The Biositemaps Working Group of the NIH Roadmap National Centers of Biomedical Computing (NCBC) (www.ncbcs.org) has developed a standard for communicating information on the Internet about biomedical resources (tools, data, software, material, and services). The official public site of the Biositemaps Project is http://www.biositemaps.org/ In addition, the working group is using the biositemaps standard to address (i) locating, (ii) querying, (iii) composing or combining, and (iv) mining biomedical resources on the Internet. Each site which intends to contribute to the inventory instantiates a file on its Internet site ‘'biositemap.rdf' which conforms to a defined Information Model and uses concepts from the Biomedical Resource Ontology (BRO) describe the resources. Each biositemap.rdf file is simply a list of controlled metadata about resources that your organization uses or believes are important to biomedical research.

The key enabling technologies are the Information Model (IM) which is the list of metadata fields about each resource (Resource_name, description, contact_person, resource_type,...) and

The Biomedical Resource Ontology (BRO) v2.7 which is a controlled terminology for the 'resource_type', 'area_of_research', and 'biomedical_activity' and which is used to improve the sensitivity and specificity of web searches. This is under development by a number of NIH-funded researchers who have a combined interest in classification of biomedical resources. The publication site for BRO is the BioPortal.